Lindows.com offered LindowsOS Developer Edition free for one day, GoogleDay (Whatever that is, I don't know, google's birthday perhaps?) so I decided to test it. My favorite distribution this far has been (and still is) Slackware Linux, which has always, well, just worked. I've been using Linux for some years now, I use Solaris at work (I work as software designer). Trying out Lindows after Slackware was totally different world, and here's some of my toughts after trying out Lindows.

The installer is easy, as it asked only hostname and root password. Nothing special about it. The only annoyance is that the installer does not let you repartition your hard drive. It's either wipe everything or wipe selected partition. The installer also doesn't handle free unpartitioned space, which I found a little strange.

After installing, a nice lilo menu is shown. It's funny that the Lindows installer added Windows XP into my lilo menu, but not my another Linux installation (Slackware).

Booting up

Bootup is slow, very slow. Never seen as slow boot up with any OS. Taking a closer look to see what happens in bootup, I was kind of shocked when I notified that Lindows tries to modprobe every module out there in bootup instead of saving the configuration and modprobing only stuff that is needed. Someone could call this "hardware detection", I call this a quick and dirty hack. I found it strange that sshd was also started. For a desktop environment, I just wonder why. Hardware was detected well anyway, and everything worked out of the box. For ACPI/APM I cannot tell exacly did it work or not, since trying to put my laptop to sleep mode, Lindows tells me you need Laptop edition to do that. My NTFS partitions were automatically mounted as read only under /disks, however, my other Linux partitions were not. Not A big "bug" since Lindows is, after all, aimed at Windows users.

It was also nice that Lindows somehow managed to use the Ati driver instead of the Vesa driver for my video card. I guess 3D acceleration is still not working for my card (couldn't CNR TuxRacer for test).

First login

After installing, the first time wizard pops up and lets you do basic things, like accept license, add users and stuff like that. I, however, chose not to create a user, I chose to run as root. Just because most of the newbie users who get it preinstalled and so on, will probably run it as root. I was interested in seeing if there are some lurking problems or risks with that option for new users.

The keyboard was automatically set as US layout. I changed that to finnish layout using KDE's Control center. My suggestion would be to add KDE's normal welcome wizard to Lindows too which allows setup of local things like this. I presume there are also Lindows users outside the US.